Argentina's stolen babies struggle with the truth.

(From South China Morning Post)

Byline: Reed Lindsay in Buenos Aires

Cesar Castillo grew up feeling something was wrong.

He looked nothing like any of his relatives. They were short, with dark skin and mestizo features. Mr Castillo was of a paler shade, he had corkscrew curly hair, and by the age of 11 he was taller than his father.

Moreover, he seemed to have inherited a diametrically opposing personality to his parents. While they were conservative, reserved and submissive, he was liberal, outgoing and an effusive talker who gesticulated wildly. Then, last March, he finally confirmed a suspicion: He was not Cesar Castillo.

His real name was Horacio Pietragalla Corti. In 1976, when he was five months old, his mother was murdered by a death squad during the brutal wave of repression, known as the "Dirty War", under Argentina's military dictatorship. His father had been killed in 1975.

For Mr Pietragalla, 27, who still lives with his adoptive parents in Buenos Aires but now goes by his birth name, the discovery made him feel he could finally get on with life. "There's no longer a lie in the way," said Mr Pietragalla, a towering man with a broad, earnest grin. "I began to realise things I never did before: my parents' inability to relate to me, why I never felt at home, the fears my mother had."